Digital oblivion is a term we've been developing at Kronika to name something that existing vocabulary kept splitting apart: the disappearance of essential evidence, knowledge, and stories from the digital sphere. We use it to hold three processes together, because in practice they compound one anothe

What we mean by

digital oblivion

Three active threats

Deliberate removal

Information disappears through the actions of states, corporations, or other structures of power: political censorship, blocked websites, archives deleted under threat of persecution, the systematic clearing of traces left by independent media.

Invisible disappearance

Information vanishes quietly, without anyone deciding to erase it: material never taken into an archive, blogs and photographs lost when a platform shuts down, obsolete formats, technical failure, and the steady privatization of digital memory.

AI-driven distortion

When models are trained on incomplete data, regions, languages, or events are simply absent. AI becomes unaware of what once existed, generates flattened or false versions of events, and reproduces and amplifies structural censorship.

Kronika works to understand, measure,

and counter this threat

At the center of that work is the Digital Oblivion Index,

a framework for identifying measurable indicators of lost, inaccessible, or endangered public-interest information. Alongside it, we're developing reports, case studies, and the Kronika Preservation Model, a practical framework for assessing risk and preserving media archives under threat.

This work grows out of Kronika's archival projects, including the Russian Independent Media Archive and the Central American Independent Media Archive, and is part of our broader effort to preserve endangered media and defend public memory.

Contact

If you work on this issue, even under a different name, or would like to contribute to this research and preservation effort, contact Vera Shengeliya

vera@kronika.technology.

We are Kronika, a civic technology project dedicated to preserving independent journalism under threat

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